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With all the excitement of Shiro crash-landing on Earth, sneaking out of the Garrison, and finding the Blue Lion, it was a good thing Pidge remembered to bring her laptop with her. Wrangling on mobile was just so much harder.
***
“I’ve got a super important question, Allura,” Lance said the day after they formed Voltron for the first time. “Life or death.”
Allura sprang up from the console she’d been poking at. “What’s wrong?” she cried. “Is it the particle barrier? I thought I’d fixed that.” She rushed over and started to pull up screens, but Lance stopped her with his hands waving wildly.
“No, no!” he said. “The particle barrier is fine. I was just wondering, since you’re tag wrangling staff, how does UTC translate into galactic standard time? I really need to know when the next wrangling party is going to start.”
The glare he got in response had him ducking out of the room with a shouted apology as he fled.
***
Pidge sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the healing pods, waiting for the rescued prisoners to wake up, and half-heartedly shoveling Killbot Phantasm freeforms. “How many different ways does a person really need to express the concept of angst?” she muttered to herself.
She looked up when Shiro came in, but he didn’t try to talk to her, just sat down on the steps and stared up at the sleeping aliens. He looked like he could use a nap himself but was determined not to let himself give in to exhaustion.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, with only the sound of Pidge’s clicking and typing. Pidge hated to bring up the topic, especially given how haggard he looked, but… “Did you know that there’s fanfic about you?” she said. “Well, fanfic about Champion. Who is apparently you.”
Shiro bowed his head. “I don’t remember much from this past year,” he told her. “But from what I do…I don’t think I’d like what people wrote about me.”
“I didn’t read any of it,” she assured him. “As your friend, it seemed inappropriate. And scary. But I did set up a program to look for mentions of my dad and Matt in them. No hits so far, but I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
Shiro nodded. “Thank you for telling me,” he said. He made a visible effort to get rid of his tension, then glanced over at her computer screen. “I’m pretty sure there’s a canonical you can syn ‘his sword is on fire’ to,” he said.
***
Allura didn’t really feel up for the usual group dinner after she destroyed the malfunctioning hologram of her father. By the end of the evening she had started feeling hungry, though, so she wandered down to the kitchen for a snack.
She expected it to be empty this time of night, but to her surprise, Hunk was there, humming quietly to himself as he twirled around cleaning up the mounds of food goo that had attacked him earlier. “Oh,” she said, startled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were here. Would you like some help?”
“No, it’s okay,” he said as she cast around for another cleaning implement. “Cleaning this up is making me less scared of it.” That made a bizarre kind of sense, although maybe she was just tired.
“You missed dinner, right?” he added. “There’s some food goo in that machine over there that won’t try to kill you.” Hunk pointed to a small dispenser in the corner.
Allura thanked him and grabbed a bowl, tiredly spooning food in her mouth as she watched Hunk and his mop continue to waltz their way around the room. She couldn’t understand how he could fear so much, do so much, and still have the energy to clean up their messes with a smile.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Why did you start volunteering with the OTW?”
He paused his dance. “Oh, well, I saw that AD&T was recruiting, and I had some coding experience and I wanted to help out. And then PAC was looking for more people, and they really seemed like they needed a hand. And then I started wrangling too because it seemed like fun… I don’t know. It all just kind of snowballed. What about you?”
“I started as a wrangler,” she said. “My father didn’t approve; he said I should be on Strategic Planning or VolCom, but I was determined to wrangle tags for my favorite ancient operas.”
Hunk grinned at that. “You’re Open Doors staff too, right?” he said.
“Preserving the past has always been important. Now more than ever for Altea. These fanfics are all that’s left of my planet, my people, and our culture. I’m not going to lose them just because someone can’t afford to keep paying for servers.”
Hunk leaned his mop against the wall and came over to give Allura a big hug. “I’m sorry you weren’t able to save your father,” he said. “But thank you for saving us.”
She buried her face in his arms and let herself cry.
***
Stranded on an alien planet, with a large glowing wound in his side, Shiro was thinking it might be a good idea to start planning for a successor.
“Keith,” he gasped through the pain. “If I don’t make it out of here, I want you to take NASA RPF and Space Vehicles (Anthropomorphic). And I want you to lead Voltron.”
“Stop talking like that,” said Keith. “You’re going to be fine. Allura and Coran will be along any minute, and we’ll get you to a healing pod right away.”
Shiro looked down at his side and then back up at Keith. “Just in case. Promise me.”
“Shut up,” Keith said.
***
“Lance, look!” Pidge grabbed Lance’s hand and dragged him into the Earth shop at the Space Mall. “Killbot Phantasm I: Journey to the Depths of the Demonsphere! We have to get this. For research purposes for wrangling.”
Lance rolled his eyes. “As your co-wrangler, I would like to point out that there’s an excellent wiki.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same. Come on, please?” She turned to the alien proprietor. “How much is it?”
“Twelve hundred GAC,” they answered.
“Okay, we’re going to find some money,” she decided. “Don’t sell that before we get back. Let’s go, Lance.”
***
“STAFF!” Pidge ran through the halls shrieking. “Staff! We need staff!”
Allura and Shiro poked their heads out of the control room door. “What’s the matter, Pidge?” Allura asked. Shiro’s arm powered down slowly with no visible attackers.
Pidge took a moment to catch her breath, then blurted, “Slav subtagged Alternate Reality to Happy Ending.”
Both Allura and Shiro stood frozen for a moment, before Allura regained her composure. “Okay, that’s okay. We can fix that,” she said, voice shaky. “I’m going to turn off wrangling, have a small panic attack, and then see what I can do.”
“Third time he’s done something like this. I’m gonna kill him,” Shiro muttered under his breath.
***
Final preparations for the attack on Zarkon’s central command were nearly complete. “All Blade agents have reported in,” Kolivan announced. “We’re ready to begin the attack when you give the word.”
“Excellent,” Coran grinned.
“Incidentally,” Kolivan added, “Antok noticed that reindex_low is getting close to 1000 and his wrangling page isn’t loading.”
“Ah, yes,” Coran said. “We’ve diverted all power to the shields. I’m afraid the archive may be down for a little while, just until we defeat Zarkon.”
Kolivan nodded. “I’ll let him know,” he said.
***
The initial period after the battle, with Shiro mysteriously vanished, was hard on everyone, but none more so than Keith. Allura gave him space for a few quintents, but eventually she couldn’t put it off any longer. She hunted him down in the training room, where he was locked in battle with the gladiator bot, sweaty and snarling.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. He didn’t acknowledge that he’d heard her, but after disarming the bot and stabbing his Marmora blade directly through its chest, he staggered over to the wall and sank down to the floor, gasping for breath.
There was no good way to tell him, so Allura decided to be blunt. “I’m going to change Shiro’s status to retired.”
Keith’s head snapped up. “What? No, you can’t do that!”
“Keith,” Allura said gently. “Shiro is gone. He may or may not be dead, but either way, he’s not here wrangling. We need to return his fandoms to the unassigned list.”
“He’ll never forgive us when he comes back and sees someone else wrangling Super Dimension Force Macross,” Keith insisted.
“He can always ask to be a co-wrangler on it again,” Allura pointed out.
“No,” Keith said flatly. “Just say he’s on hiatus. I know his username and password - I can do some shoveling until we find him.”
Allura shook her head, but she didn’t mark Shiro as retired.
***
“Hey Lance,” Hunk called as they sprawled in the lounge after the latest battle with Lotor. “Could I get a translation?”
“Sure, buddy.”
“Adam y Jamie luchan contra un tiburón por la ciencia,” Hunk said, careful with his pronunciation.
“Oh, Mythbusters?” Lance said. “That’s, ‘Adam and Jamie fight a shark for science.’”
“Science can be fun,” Hunk said. “Thanks!”
“Any time,” Lance replied. “Actually, can you send me the link to that fic? I need something that’ll make me laugh right now.”
***
Since escaping from the Galra for the second time, there were a lot of little things missing from Shiro’s memory. What was his preferred brand of toothpaste? Where did he leave his vest? Did the character tag “Apollo 13 Crew” sort by A for Apollo or C for Crew?
“Damn it,” he muttered to himself, after he’d been staring at “Neil Armstrong/Apollo 13 Crew” in his unwrangled bin for a good ten minutes. “Why didn’t I leave a comment on this tag?”
Shiro shoved his computer away and massaged the back of his neck, trying to fight off his growing headache. Maybe he’d just leave this for now and go work on battle plans.
***
“Look at this,” Allura shouted, shoving her screen at Lance. She looked on the verge of tears. His jaw dropped as he took in the dozens of horribly misspelled character and relationship tags, and the wall of rambly freeforms.
“Is it reportable?” he asked with faint hope.
“No,” she said. “I checked. It just barely makes enough sense to count as fanwork content.”
“Damn,” he said, and then realized who exactly it was that had posted this fic. “Lotor,” he growled. “We’re going to get him, don’t worry.”
***
“Is there fanfic for The Voltron Show?” Hunk whispered backstage.
“Dunno,” Lance answered. “We should check it out later. I wanna see how people write Loverboy Lance.”
Hunk rolled his eyes. “You’re just going to be jealous of how much action the fictional you is getting.”
“Whatever, man,” Lance said, and swung his bayard up with a flourish before leaping out onto the stage.
That night, Lance padded into Hunk’s room in his Blue Lion pajamas and they scrolled through AO3 together. Hunk kept a running tally of Loverboy Lance’s terrible pick-up lines, much to the real Lance’s annoyance. “I’m so much smoother than that,” Lance grumbled.
“I wonder who wrangles this,” Hunk mused. “Hang on.”
It was ao3 user themoststylishmoustache. They stared at the screen in horror. “Isn’t that Coran?” Lance asked.
Hunk nodded slowly. “Yup.”
***
“Hunk, why are you using SVN?” Pidge asked, aghast. “Git is so much easier.”
“Calm down, Pidge,” Hunk took a bite of his sandwich. “I don’t need git’s extra complexity while I’m connected to the main repository.”
“Yeah, but merging your commits is still so much better with git.”
Hunk rolled his eyes. “Too many extra button presses,” he said.
Both looked up as Sam walked past. “Don’t let me interrupt,” he said.
“Oh, hey, Dad, real quick,” Pidge said. “What’s the best version control system?”
“Well, I usually like to use git for…”
He was cut off by Pidge’s triumphant, “Ha!”
“Ah,” he nodded at them, smiling. “Version control system arguments. That’s how your mother and I met.”
Pidge and Hunk glanced at each other in mutual horror before looking away quickly.
***
There were plenty of things for Keith to do on the space whale. Hunt, fish, spar, play with the wolf puppy, reconnect with his mother. Every night, though, he would refresh his wrangling page, and every night he would be disappointed.“I haven’t gotten a single new tag in any of my fandoms in days,” he complained to Krolia.
“Time runs differently here,” she reminded him. “It’s probably only been a few minutes for the rest of the universe.”
“Ugh!” he groaned, flopping back dramatically.
***
AO3 was a revelation for Romelle. “You can tag as many characters as you like?” she marveled. “You can tag relationships?”
“Yes,” Allura told her. “You’ve really never been on AO3?”
Romelle shook her head. “I didn’t even know it existed. Lotor always had our colony use FFN.”
“Oh you poor thing,” Allura said. “Don’t worry. I’ll teach you everything you need to know. Who knows, you may even be a volunteer like us soon.”
***
“You’ve been gone for three decaphoebs,” Acxa told the paladins. There was a horrified silence as they all stared at one another, mouths open. Pidge broke it with an anguished cry. “My BINS!” There was a dull thud to her left as Romelle hit the ground in a dead faint.